Around January 23, 1816

Mr. Hipps had lived in the Georgetown area two years before he was brutally murdered. The regions mail carrier, Mr. Hipps was making his route towards Georgetown on a Saturday afternoon when his mail carriage was robbed and he was murdered. When members of the community noticed that the mail carriage hadnt arrived, a number of men went out on their horses to check on the delay. These men encountered...

The need for a new lighthouse on Bald Head, a coastal point on Smith's Island, North Carolina, was obvious when proposals were received at the Office of the Commissioner of the Revenue in May of 1816. Since the construction of Bald Head's first lighthouse, there had been a drastic change in the Cape Fear River channel. Threatened by shorefront erosion, the original lighthouse appeared...

In the National House of Representatives, Congressman Johnson of Kentucky introduced a bill to establish Arkansas under the second grade of territorial development. The bill provided for treatment of the Arkansas Territory similarly to the Territory of Missouri and pushed it closer to becoming a state. Johnson's bill looked to past acts of Congress regarding Southern territory as guidelines...

On August 29, 1820, the Arkansas Gazette told of an old woman who had dozed off one Sunday in church, probably due to the heat and an oppressively long and boring sermon. The incident might have gone unnoticed but for her Bible, which slipped out of her lap and fell to the floor, creating a massive racket. Jolted half awake by the noise, the elderly lady, known to her fellow churchgoers...

As the price of Bayley's son steadily rose and the auctioneer continued to call for the highest bidder, Solomon Bayley leaned agains the wall of the church to support himself in the heat of the summer sun. They boy who had been taken from him years earlier was up for sale, and it looked as though Bayley would lose his once in a lifetime opportunity to buy his son back. This is the story of Solomon...

As was common during the early nineteenth century, a Milledgeville slaveholder ran a public notice when one of his slaves escaped from his plantation by the Wateree River on May 18, 1820. The slave, Davy, was described in the Southern Recorder as a 25-30 year old man, about 5'10' tall, with a well made, round face, with tolerable large whiskers.' Betton, the owner, surmised that...

In June of 1820, the Alexandria Herald ran an editorial condemning Northerners for their attacks on slaveholding. The writer used primary evidence to make the argument that those who criticized Southerners for upholding the institution of slavery were hypocritical because many of them made money from illegal importation of slaves overseas, the act that produced this servitude (Alexandria).'...

John England served a priest in various capacities in his native country, Ireland, from 1808 to 1820. On June 17, 1820, England was appointed by Pope Pius VII as bishop of the new diocese centered in Charleston, SC. He did not receive word of this decision until July 10, when he read the news in a letter from Reverend Henry Hughes. England was asked to accept the position and travel to America...

John W. Bridges of Wilcox County, Alabama, desperately penned a letter to the Southern Recorder, the Columbian Telescope, the Carolina Observer, and the Georgia Advertiser on May 27, 1820, looking for a runaway slave by the name of Aaron. A few weeks prior to the publication of this letter, Aaron, a stout well-fed Negro man of 30 years standing around 5'10 had escaped from the John Bridges'...

Benjamin Rawlings prepared eagerly for his wedding day. His brother James, concerned for Benjamin's future, wrote to him to give some pre-marital advice. In the early nineteenth century south, young marriage was encouraged. James, though a bachelor, spoke highly of marrying young, as a friend once told him, "temper and habits of the young are not come so still and uncomplying as when more...